Who is this article for?
This article will be useful to you if are a company on PartnerStack, looking to improve your email delivery, and brand your partner emails to use your business domain.
PartnerStack requires all companies in our Marketplace to authenticate their domain with PartnerStack. Authenticating your domain allows you to safely, and securely send branded email campaigns that land in your partner’s inbox.
This guide will walk you through the process of authentication by setting the appropriate DNS records to your domain to pass strict DMARC policies.
Technical overview
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) was created to tell email servers what to do with emails that say they are from one domain, but are actually from another. For instance, an email From @Acme.com that is sent from @PartnerStack.com.
This kind of ‘email spoofing’ is a common method used by scammers and fraudsters to impersonate your domain with ‘phishing’ attacks. Because of this, most email inboxes will now flag or outright reject emails that do not pass DMARC.
Passing DMARC policies requires emails to be protected by a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and/or DomainKeys Identified Message (DKIM), which are established by your domain’s DNS records.
Learn more about DMARC, SPF, and DKIM
Authenticating your domain with PartnerStack
You can set up a custom email domain (ex. @acme.com) to be able to send email campaigns from any teammate with that email domain.
To create a custom email domain you will need:
- Access to your DNS records. You may need some help from your engineers or your webmaster.
- A teammate with that email domain. For example, if you want to set up a custom email domain for @acme.com, you need at least one teammate with an email address ending in that domain (ex. martin@acme.com). If you don’t yet have this teammate, invite them to your instance and ensure they join before starting.
- Full “Integrations” permissions for your account. If you do not have Integrations permissions, contact an Admin on your team.
To create a custom email domain:
- Navigate to your Settings tab in your left-hand menu
- If you do not have access to the Settings tab, reach out to a teammate with Admin permissions
- Under the Custom email domains (DMARC) settings card, click “Add your email domain”
- Select which custom email domain you want to send email campaigns from
- Add the given three CNAME records to your DNS
- You may need the assistance of your technical team to complete this step. You may Copy all DNS values to copy the contents of all three CNAME records to your clipboard, then paste into a message to your engineers or webmaster
- When you have entered your records, click "Verify domain". If your CNAME records were correct and have propagated, your custom email domain will show as Verified
- Once added, it may take between 10 minutes to 12 hours for your DNS records to propagate and be detected by PartnerStack, during which time records may show as Couldn’t verify
Once your custom email domain is validated, you can send email campaigns from any teammate with that domain. For example, once the custom email domain @acme.com is validated, emails can be sent to partners from the teammates martin@acme.com or rachel@acme.com.
Troubleshooting custom email domains
Some issues may occur while you’re setting up custom email domains:
- My DNS record won’t show as Validated. Please allow up to 12 hours for your DNS records to propagate, then hit “Verify” again. If still shown as “Couldn’t verify”, please ensure there are no typos in your DNS records, and that you’ve formatted the DNS values correctly if you use GoDaddy.
- All three DNS records are marked as Validated, while my custom email domain is marked as Couldn’t verify. (Or vice versa.) Unfortunately, this sometime happens due to an issue with our third-party email service provider, Sendgrid. Please wait a few minutes, then hit “Verify” again.
Next steps
With the correct DNS records added, PartnerStack emails to your partners will pass DMARC and increase the deliverability of your partner campaigns.
If your emails are still landing in spam folders, there are other reasons that this could be happening:
- The recipient has flagged your emails as spam
- Your email content, including the message body, links, images, and headers, can all be factors that rank for spam. Consider your content carefully and consult a marketing specialist if necessary.
To see a breakdown of the potential reasons your emails are landing in spam we recommend trying a free email tester.